Why President Obama Will Never Be Barack Obama Again

The most captivating political story of the present moment is not the Republican resurgence but rather the ongoing diminution of President Barack Obama. It is a story that started almost as soon as he took office, took hold with the passage of the stimulus, played itself out during the health-care debate and its aftermath, and reached its inevitable climax on Tuesday night. It is the story not of policy but rather of personality, and what makes it so captivating is its element of mystery. President Obama, after all, was elected by virtue of his personality, which provided not only contrast but novelty, and was grounded in his near-perfect pitch when addressing audiences large and small. Sure, he was cool and cerebral, but he was also confident, almost cocky, because he had the power to summon inspiring rhetoric on command, which meant that he had the power to summon us on command. Though many Americans didn't know very much about him, there was one thing that was never in doubt when we saw and heard Obama on the stump: his ownership of his gift. By the way he carried himself, we could tell that he had always had it, and because he always had it, we could be sure that he always would have it. How could we resist a man who simply by opening his mouth could move mountains — and who had ascended all the way to the presidency by staking his political life on his own eloquence? How could we resist a man who seemed so sure that we could not resist him?

Now his gift has all but deserted him, and all that prevents the story from becoming tragic is his own apparent refusal to be affected by it. There are many explanations for why he seems diminished by the power of his own office, from the vestigial racism of the American public to his misreading of his own mandate. But those are political explanations of a predicament that demands musical metaphors. Imagine Miles Davis losing not just his ability to blow but also his mystique; he might get his chops back, but the aura would be more difficult to restore, along with his ability to captivate audiences by turning his back on them. Of course, Obama has never turned his back on us, but so many Americans have turned their backs on him that it amounts to The Anointed One, as he is sometimes referred, being stripped of something that can never return: his anointment. And without it — without his air of destiny, without the idea of Obama augmenting his actuality — the rooms he used to occupy so effortlessly have changed dimensions on him, until at times he might as well be speaking from the bottom of a well. Does anyone remember the speech he gave at West Point, when he escalated the war in Afghanistan after six weeks of slow-ketchup decision making? He was all alone on that stage, and he looked all alone and somehow outnumbered by the space that surrounded him. It was the first time he was betrayed by his own stagecraft. It was the first time the enormity of his decision dwarfed the eloquence he found to express it, and he has never again looked like a man born to fill stadiums.

All this was in play on Wednesday, at the press conference he gave after the bloodletting of the mid-term elections. Could anyone have ever imagined that Barack Obama would be made to look inauthentic by the sloppy last-call tears of someone like John Boehner? Could anyone have ever imagined that he'd be in a room of reporters who wanted something from him — that he wouldn't be able to deliver? The man acclaimed as the most gifted communicator of our age had to be prodded into admitting "it feels bad," and after nearly an hour of prolix boilerplate offered but one takeaway line, "The Slurpee is a delicious drink," before warming up and saying that he was going to invite Boehner to a Slurpee Summit. Indeed, the press conference was so painfully incommensurate to its historical moment that one had to wonder if he knew it — if he knew that even on this observance of loss he was losing his audience; if he knew that that he had lost not only the House of Representatives and a broad swath of the American electorate but his ability to talk his way into or out of anything; if the great singer knew that he had lost his voice.

As it turned out, he did. The last question was the shortest and the simplest, and yet it touched some wounded part of the president that the others hadn't. A reporter from Reuters asked if his leadership style was out of touch with the American people, and Barack Obama responded by saying that "Folks didn't have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa... They understood that my story was theirs." He responded by saying that "When you are in this place, it's hard not to seem removed... Those letters I read day and night, some of them break my heart. But nobody films me reading those letters." He responded by saying that "This is something that every president needs to go through. We lose track of the ways that we connect to folks that got us there in the first place. Now, I'm not recommending that every president take a shellacking like I did last night..." And with this, at least, he got a laugh, respectful and circumspect.

There will be some who will construe Obama's last long answer as a self-involved man's bleat of self-pity, the narcissist's premature nostalgia for the green season of his own powers. But it sounded different than anything that came before it, and it sounded not just true but inescapable. In less than two years he had gone from sounding like a man who could always count on his ability to strum the mystic chords of memory to a man who, no matter what he said, sounded like a politician, and one in over his head at that. Now he sounded like a man who had already realized that he had lost more than he imagined he could but was just starting to understand that he was never going to get it back. He wasn't going to cry about it — leave that to the Republicans — but he was going to take stock, and that may have represented a beginning of sorts, even if it was also clearly an end.

Barack Obama's gift was so musical that one has to resort to musical comparisons to explain what might be left now that it's fled him. Dylan was never Dylan after the motorcycle accident any more than Elvis was Elvis after the Army: what they didn't lose they had to wrestle with, and no longer was the electricity effortless. It will be the same way for the president; hell, it already is, and has been for much longer than we'd like to admit. He'll never be Barack Obama again, now that he's been rejected, and the oils of anointment are off of him. But Barack Obama — President Obama — can still be great, even if he has to sing someone else's song.

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